AcouBatt, a University College London spinout developing AI-powered acoustic sensing technology for battery manufacturing and monitoring, has raised £1.1 million in pre-seed funding to help manufacturers produce lithium-ion batteries faster, with less waste and greater visibility into potential safety defects.
The round was led by Creator Fund with participation from Ada Ventures. AcouBatt has also received support from the Faraday Institution and is currently piloting its technology at the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre, or UKBIC.
The London-based deep-tech company has developed technology that effectively acts as a “stethoscope” for batteries. It combines acoustic emission sensors with proprietary artificial intelligence to detect and interpret activity occurring inside battery cells during manufacturing.
AcouBatt is initially targeting the battery formation process, one of the most important and time-consuming stages of cell production.
During formation, a newly manufactured battery cell is charged and discharged for the first time. The process can take as long as two weeks, but manufacturers currently have limited real-time visibility into whether individual cells are forming correctly.
According to AcouBatt, the lack of visibility contributes to manufacturing bottlenecks, scrap rates that can reach 30% and the risk that defective cells may pass through conventional quality-control processes.
AcouBatt’s sensors listen to acoustic signals generated by electrochemical and mechanical activity occurring inside the battery.
Its AI models separate relevant battery activity from background noise and interpret changes in those signals as they occur, giving manufacturers additional information about a cell’s condition while it is still being produced.
The company believes this approach can address three major challenges for battery manufacturers: production speed, safety and material waste.
By combining acoustic emission information with electrochemical data, AcouBatt can identify when important formation processes have been completed. This could allow manufacturers to remove conservative time buffers and shorten the formation process by as much as 30% without reducing battery performance.
Its technology is also designed to recognize early acoustic signatures associated with developing faults, potentially allowing manufacturers to identify compromised cells before they leave the factory.
Real-time monitoring could additionally help production teams identify deviations earlier and make process corrections before an entire batch is completed, reducing the amount of expensive battery material that ultimately has to be discarded.
The potential applications extend beyond manufacturing.
AcouBatt said its technology can be deployed within battery energy storage systems to identify underperforming or failing cells before they lead to safety incidents or unexpected downtime.
Over time, the company believes the same diagnostic approach could be applied to electric vehicles and other battery-powered systems, providing continuous information about battery health throughout a cell’s operating life.
AcouBatt was founded in 2025 by Dr. Arthur Fordham and Chris Haoxin Xu, who met through London Business School’s Innovation to Market program, which connects PhD researchers with commercially oriented co-founders.
The company’s core technology stems from Fordham’s PhD research at UCL’s Electrochemical Innovation Lab. That work was supported by the Faraday Institution through its SafeBatt project.
UCL Ventures, the university’s commercialization organization, supported the formation of AcouBatt and assigned the underlying intellectual property to the company. AcouBatt said its platform builds on more than a decade of battery acoustic research led by Fordham at UCL.
The company is now moving from research toward industrial deployment.
AcouBatt’s sensors are operating in the laboratory at UKBIC, the UK’s national battery scale-up facility, where the company is benchmarking its diagnostic technology.
The goal is to introduce commercial-scale products to the broader battery industry in 2027.
The new funding will support expansion of AcouBatt’s technical team, continued development of its AI models and progress across its industrial pilot program with battery manufacturers.
The opportunity comes as governments invest heavily in domestic battery manufacturing capacity to support electric vehicles, grid-scale storage and consumer electronics.
The release noted that China currently accounts for approximately 80% of battery manufacturing, while the UK government announced a £452 million Battery Innovation Programme as part of its industrial strategy.
AcouBatt is positioning its technology as one way Western battery manufacturers could improve the economics and reliability of production without requiring major changes to existing manufacturing processes.
Unlike destructive testing approaches, AcouBatt’s system is designed to monitor batteries without altering the manufacturing process itself.
For manufacturers attempting to scale production, that could provide a new stream of information about what is happening inside cells without slowing production or requiring cells to be dismantled for inspection.
The broader objective is to give battery manufacturers and operators better insight throughout a cell’s lifecycle, beginning with formation and potentially continuing through years of operation in energy storage systems, electric vehicles and other applications.
KEY QUOTES:
“Batteries are the foundation of modern infrastructure, yet up until now, they have been tightly locked in a black box. That is why advanced diagnostics are the next major frontier. AcouBatt provides a diagnostic tool that not only saves massive amounts of time on the factory floor but helps manufacturers and operators truly understand and look after their battery systems from the moment they are formed to the end of their working life.”
Dr. Arthur Fordham, Co-Founder and CEO of AcouBatt
“Western battery manufacturers are under immense pressure to scale and innovate at speed, while keeping safety and cost top of mind. Our technology opens the door for manufacturers to drastically cut waste, optimise their processes, and bring safer, better batteries to the market more quickly.”
Chris Haoxin Xu, Co-Founder and Commercial Director of AcouBatt
“Battery manufacturing is becoming a strategic priority for almost every major economy and global demand is surging to support EVs, grid-scale storage, and electronics. But global demand is accelerating faster than manufacturers’ ability to guarantee quality at scale.”
Jamie Macfarlane, CEO of Creator Fund
“If we’re serious about electrifying everything, we can’t keep scrapping battery cells, principally because manufacturers can’t see inside the battery formation black boxes. AcouBatt has changed this in a way that no-one else has been able to, which is exactly why we invested.”
Matt Penneycard, Co-Founding Partner at Ada Ventures
